82 sions. She uses the ever-present threat that Solly will be caught with his pants down as a means of creating suspense, but she does a lot more with it than that. In the course of the film she makes us understand that the fact of Solly's circumcision is, in a sense, all that keeps him honest. If he could wish his missing bit of foreskin back into existence, he could get into bed with anyone, literally and metaphori- cally. He's an awfully adaptable kid. He's attractive, personable, good at languages, and deft at lying, and he isn't burdened with an excess of reli- gious zeal: he has a talent for blend- ing in with whatever surroundings he finds himself in, for becoming what- ever the people around him want him to be. (His quick instincts in sizing up changes in a situation and his chameleonlike ability to change him- self along with it are the qualities of a picaresque hero.) By the time Solly is initiated into the Hitler Youth, he has already run through several iden- tities, and has proved himself capable of playing his roles with conviction and enthusiasm. After his sister's death, his family fled to Lodz, in Poland, and when his parents heard that the German Army was approaching they ordered Solly and his older brother Isaac (Rene Hofschneider) to pack up and head east, toward the Soviet Union. The movie shows us a few pointed scenes of Solly's life in a Soviet school: he becomes a star pupil, and is accepted- despite his petit-bourgeois origins- into the most prestigious Communist youth organization, the Komsomol. W e see him stand before an assembly of his student comrades and give a fervent, impeccably Stalinist oration on the evils of religion; and then, after the Ger- mans attack and he has been taken prisoner, we see him renounce his Communist ideology and reincarnate himself, on the spot, as an orphaned "pure" German, an Aryan child wan- dering in the barbaric eastern wilder- ness. His captors are so charmed and moved by his story that they ignore his lack of identity papers. By turn- ing himself into the hero of a Nazi fairy tale, Solly stirs the tender emotions of the Wehrmacht soldiers and earns the privilege of accompanying them, as trans- lator and mascot, on their march through Russia. He's very popular: one officer falls in love with him; the commander of the unit wants to adopt him. So when Solly arrives at the Hitler Youth school he has had plenty of practice in conforming to the expecta- tions of totalitarian institutions. And we have seen how skillful he is at disarming his enemies, how proficient he is at using his youth and beauty and glibness to dazzle and distract his pursuers. Putting on his Hitler Youth uniform for the first time, Solly breaks into a grin and does a silly little soft- shoe in front of the mirror, as if to loosen himself up for the twenty-four- hour-a-day performance he knows he's going to have to give. Everything that's most appealing in him is in this frisky, parodic dance-as well as ev- erything that's most disturbing. The situation he's in won't allow him to sustain a playful attitude toward his latest act of impersonation: his youth- ful delight in getting away with some- thing is attenuated by the intolerable pressure of never being able to rest- he's playing his part ceaselessly, with- out intermission. In these circumstances, which would test even the strongest, most fully formed identity, this malleable teen-ager is often tempted to resolve his emotional tensions by surrendering to his role, losing himself in the embrace of the enemy's culture and ideology. In one terrifying scene, the film shows us the brown-shirted students' response to the news of the German Army's defeat in Russia: they weep, and Solly, giving in to the collective emotion of the mo- ment, weeps with them. His desire to reduce the cognitive dissonance of his existence-to live a "norma]" life in the perverse and monolithic universe of the Reich-reaches a heartbreaking climax when he attempts, in the pri- vacy of a bathroom stall, to alter the unalterable, to erase the last vestige of his J ewishness. W or king, painfully, with bits of thread, he tries to extend the flesh of his penis into something LOFT SPACE /. ø A.VAI LABLE ,e .K : ; I " -I il! iiiii .1__ 1\ltll I <'1 "I >KIII:I M.IAM JULY I, 1991 resembling a foreskin. These scenes of self-mutilation-of exhausted surren- der to the impulse to annihilate oneself in uniformity-are unbearably inti- mate. W e know that Solly has under- taken this grotesque experiment in part so he can satisfy a fundamental human appetite: he wants to sleep with his girlfriend. (This blond beauty, played by Julie Delpy, is a passionately com- mitted Nazi and a rabid anti-Semite; she wants to bear a child for the Führer.) Holland, sympathetic and yet pitilessly objective, makes these pas- sages seem a kind of apotheosis of the ironies in Solly Perel's extraordinary story. In all the art and history of the Holocaust, there is no clearer image of the cost of survival-of the unnatural forms that even this most basic instinct can sometimes take. At such moments we see the hero of "Europa Europa" as a creature immersed in ambiguities, not drowning but not surfacing, ei- ther-a young man who can't allow himself simply to be. In dangerous circumstances, he manages to reach maturity, and that's a victory, but his sense of self is stillborn He seems, at the end, an elusive, undefinable entity: a boy forever on the eve of his bar mitzvah. In the movie's final scene, Holland shows us the real Salomon Perel: he's a bald, sixty-five-year-old man stand- ing on the bank of a river in Israel (where he has lived since the war). As the camera rests on him, in closeup, we try to read his features, to find in them some clue to the meaning of his almost inconceivable experience. Like most faces, Perel's is ultimately inscrutable. He looks mournful and somewhat dazed, but it's difficult to attribute even these qualities to him with any cer- tainty: we may be only projecting our own emotions and expectations onto him, as the Soviets and the Nazis did when he was young. We can't imagine how this man could sort out all he has lived through. A couple of times in the course of the film, Holland presumes to enter young Solly's dreams. These sequences are grimly comic jumbles of images and ideas from the disparate experiences that have imposed themselves on his consciousness: Hitler and Stalin dance with each other, surrounded by a corps of Soviet baby ballerinas; Hitler hides from his own secret police in the closet of the Perels' apartment in Germany, then turns into one of Solly's